Curmudgeon Notes 1.23.2013

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

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More exclusives, less editing

•Enquirer
reporter Sharon Coolidge’s use of open records law documented
Cincinnati’s lax enforcement of lead paint removal orders. She told
CityBeat that her coverage included positive impacts in addition to
those above in my main column:

The
day after her story was published, Mayor Mark Mallory ordered health
officials to explain why they hadn't forced problem landlords to clean
up their properties.

Three
public hearings led to a comprehensive city plan to eliminate childhood
lead poisoning by 2010. The plan lowers the medical threshold at which
health officials can intervene, thus catching lead poisoning in its
earliest stages.

City
Council gave the health department more than $1 million to finance
reforms. Poor families are getting kits to detect whether their homes
are contaminated.

In
one of his first acts as new governor, Ted Strickland allowed cities to
sue lead-paint producers; Cincinnati is suing Sherwin-Williams.

State
lawmakers are considering a new law, named after a family featured in
the Enquirer story, to provide $20,000 grants for lead removal.

•A
more recent public benefit from open records laws involved the Enquirer
suit to obtain secret streetcar vendors’ bids. Attorney Jack Greiner,
who handles First Amendment issues for the paper, said that Cincinnati's
ordinance requires bids be available for public review. Faced with
resistance, the Enquirer went to court. Hamilton County appellate judges
agreed with the paper, rejecting company arguments that records were
exempt from public records law as "trade secrets."

•Unless
you’re living under a Rock of Cliches, you’ve read or heard that flu is
sweeping the nation. Every sneeze, every cough, every chill and shiver
warns us that the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse is tethering his
pale horse at our curb. The catch is that despite breathless news media
offerings, little unusual is happening except for an early, aggressive
onset of the perennial scourge. Thousands die every year from flu, most
of them elderly. It would be news if we didn’t. Annual death estimates —
hampered by incomplete reporting and similar health problems — range
from 3,000 to 49,000.

•An
Enquirer Sunday Forum carried Michael Kinsley’s column about Hillary
Clinton’s extensive foreign travel as secretary of state. Kinsley doubts
the value of much of her travel but in today’s world, “The less
important the trip, the more prestige you gain by taking it.” Having
time and money to waste proves you have time and money to waste . . .
even if you’re on the taxpayers’ clock and paycheck. Maybe that
explains an otherwise inexplicable Enquirer revelation that Steve Chabot
is a foreign policy expert, citing his extensive foreign travel at
taxpayer expense.

•Enquirer
reporter Dan Horn produced two nay-saying front page stories. Both were
welcome surprises from Cincinnati’s “get on the team” daily. One questioned the argument that right-to-work laws provide an economic
boost in states like Indiana, Michigan, or, potentially, Ohio. That
anti-union policy was a staple topic in my 1950s high school debating
days. Economic analysis, like divining why crime rates change, is more
complicated than whether union membership is optional or required in a
“union shop.” Too many union/right-to-work debates — fueled by
no-compromise advocates putting re-election before public benefit —
ignore complexity.

•A
second invocation of skepticism by the Enquirer’s Dan Horn raised
serious doubts about feel-good gun buy-back programs. I’ll go this far
on guns: each firearm bought back and destroyed (not bought back and
sold to dealers for resale) is a gun that won’t kill someone. Cincinnati
Police destroy buy-back weapons not needed for investigations.
Buy-back, however, won’t change life on Cincinnati streets where scores
of young men kill each other each year. Anyone who wants a firearm can
get one faster than you can say, “Your money or your life.” Similar
doubts about Cincinnati’s gun buy-back program made Page 1 of the New
York Times.

•Fox
19’s Dave Culbreth came up with a smart take on the controversial idea
of arming teachers and school administrators. He interviewed Target
World assistant manager Amy Hanlon who demonstrated how a woman could
carry a concealed handgun. As Culbreth noted, there was nothing special
about her clothing: slacks, blouse, overshirt. By the end of the
interview, she’d removed nine concealed semi-automatics or revolvers,
including one tucked under her bra in a holster that also was displayed
on a counter-top mannequin bust.

•WCPO-TV plans an online local news challenge to the Enquirer’s Cincinnati.com,
according to Business Courier’s Jon Newberry. It’s a pioneering effort
by Cincinnati-based E. W. Scripps that could go national, Newberry
suggested. Whether additional reporters, producers, editors, etc., will
come from the Business Courier and other established news media was not
clear. Scripps — a Cincinnati-based national print and broadcast company— published the Cincinnati Post until it closed the barely-sustaining
joint operating agreement with the Enquirer ended in 2007.

•Blogger
Peter Heimlich tipped me to Channel 19 anchor Ben Swann’s web gig
called Full Disclosure. Swann says there are enough witnesses to
challenge official police narratives of single shooters at three recent
massacres: the Oak Creek, Wis., Sikh temple; Aurora, Colo., Batman movie
premiere, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Salon.com challenged Swann about his apparent validation of those counter-narratives and he replied in part, “The
bottom line for me is the issue of asking questions. As you will
notice, I don’t call these operations ‘false flag’ as many people do …
(his ellipses) But as a journalist, that is not my job. Rather, my job
is to be a critical thinker.” And he added, “most of our media fail to question stories . . . a journalist’s job is not to have the answers, it is to ask the questions and search for truth.”

•There’s
a pathetic undercurrent in the Enquirer’s Monday Page1 profile of
Henry Heimlich’s efforts to regain American Red Cross support for his
eponymous “maneuver.” The physician claims there is no research to
support the Red Cross’s decision to return to back slaps rather than
Heimlich abdominal thrusts as first response to choking. Other than
Heimlich’s self-serving claims, there is no research proving his
maneuver works as well or better than back slaps. Assertions are not
evidence. Moreover, the Red Cross adopted Heimlich’s maneuver years ago
without the research Heimlich is calling for now. Heimlich has
anecdotal evidence of lives saved but that’s not research. Wisely,
reporter Cliff Radel quoted skeptics and critics of the maneuver. That
kind of even-handedness usually escapes admiring Enquirer stories about
Heimlich. And if the paper ever corrected a Memorial Day feature on
water safety, I missed it. The Enquirer drew national ridicule with its
illustration on how to use Heimlich’s maneuver to revive a standing
near-drowning victim.

•It’s
spitting into the wind to ask sports reporters to question what jocks
tell them, especially when truth-telling endangers future access. In the
Good Old Days, who read about fornicating, drunken and racist
professional athletes? More recently, golf reporters and publications
didn’t write about married Tiger Woods’ screwing around. This time, it’s
Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o’s stories about the heart-ripping
death of girlfriend Lennay Kekua from leukemia. Editors loved it. Now,
it seems she was a fiction amplified by incurious and credulous
reporters. It took sports blog Deadspin.com
to reveal the fraud after its reporters could find no public records of
her birth, life, education or death. Almost as nauseating as the
saccharine original stories about her death are the faux introspection
by sycophant reporters caught by the fraud.

•We’ve
gone a week without a promo for Oprah’s interview with champion
liar-cheater Lance Armstrong. That’s closure. So what does Armstrong do
now? Pitch performance enhancing drugs and blood transfusions on ESPN
and late TV?

•Al
Gore sold his troubled Current cable network to Al Jazeera, the
satellite network based in Qatar in the Persian Gulf. Good. Nothing bars
foreigners from owning a cable network here, unlike the law that forced
Australian Rupert Murdoch to obtain U.S. citizenship after he bought Fox.

Backed
by the ruling Qatari emir, Al Jazeera scandalized Americans for
broadcasting tirades by Osama bin Laden and other anti-western Arab
leaders. We should have welcomed what they said in Arabic for home
audiences. Too often, we rely on sanitized remarks for
non-Arabic-speaking audiences or Washington assurances it was trying to
verify that speakers were who they said they were. Al Jazeera also
infuriated Arab audiences by carrying interviews with American and
Israeli officials that others in the Middle East ignored or rejected.

Most
American cable companies won’t carry the newer Al Jazeera English but
its website is one of my daily stops, especially when, say, AQIM kidnaps
oil workers in Algeria or French Legionnaires assist Mali’s pathetic
army in trying to halt and turn back Islamist rebels.

Al
Jazeera coverage of “Arab Spring” was so aggressive that embattled
North African rulers correctly accused it of supporting anti-government
demonstrators. So is Al Jazeera open to interference by the Qatari
government? Yes. Are its biases plain to anyone who listens or reads?
Yes. We don’t ignore Fox News for its biases.

•American
news media employ local nationals in foreign bureaus for their contacts
and language skills. That reliance failed when no one reported the 2010
anti-semitic rant by Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who
now is Egypt’s president. In part, Morsi called Jews “apes and dogs” and
shared the fantasy that the Palestinian Authority was “created by the
Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will
of the Palestinian people and its interests.”

Still
nastier, he urged listeners “to nurse our children and our
grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews . . .
bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the
descendants of apes and pigs.”

A
stump speech in his Nile Delta hometown, it took more than two years to
reach English-language news media. The original Arabic video is on
YouTube now. I encountered a translation of Morsi this month on a Forbes
website that, in part, chided the New York Times for missing or killing
the story. Days later, it was on Page 1 of the Times. After that, the
Obama administration an official “tut-tut.”

•Maybe
they’ll blame one of those ominous Canadian Cold Air Masses
(meteorological, not theological) for the brain freeze that disabled
news judgment at the Toronto Star. Flippant columns about rape aren’t
funny. Jimromenesko.com
posted these first two paragraphs of Rosie DiManno’s column about
testimony during the sexual abuse trial of a local physician:

“She lost a womb but gained a penis.

“The former was being removed surgically — full hysterectomy — while the latter was forcibly shoved into her slack mouth..."

•Headlines
are an art that always risks a step too far in an attempt to cure the copy editor boredom and draw readers to a story. This one, from philly.com,
achieves both in what has become a national story about a popular and
well-connected parish pastor: “Catholic priest/meth dealer liked sex in
the rectory.” You know you’d read more.

•Finally,
this from Shannyn Moore, who blogs on HuffPost as “Just a Girl from
Homer, Alaska.” It appeared first in the Anchorage Daily News and makes
her points without venturing beyond the pale into bad taste: “I'm
not advocating for no guns. I like mine and am not about to give them
up. But in this country, my uterus is more regulated than my guns. Birth
control and reproductive health services are harder to get than
bullets. What is that about? Guns don't kill people — vaginas do?”